[Opinion] – Ghostbusters Is The Most Successfully Comedic Film

In which I support and backtrack from that rather definitive
statement.

Before we go any further, a disclaimer: I have not, as of
this writing, seen the new Ghostbusters film.
This article is not about the new Ghostbusters
film. I have, as of this writing, no opinion about the new Ghostbusters film. After, and only after, I have seen the new Ghostbusters film, will I comment on the
new Ghostbusters film. When I do, my
comments will be about the new Ghostbusters
film, and not on the original. This article is an examination of the original Ghostbusters film, and my personal
belief that it is one of the greatest comedies ever made. This is an article
I’ve been meaning to write for a while, and the new Ghostbusters film offers a good excuse to publish it. Perhaps,
after seeing the new Ghostbusters
film, I will offer a retraction and declare it one of the greatest comedies
ever made. Maybe I won’t. Saying that I like the original is not the same as
proclaiming that the new Ghostbusters
film will be bad because it isn’t the original, so I don’t want any of that
sexist, nostalgic nonsense in the comments. Got it?

If Ghostbusters
were a novel, people would call it a magnum opus. It is the pinnacle of talent
and ability for pretty much everyone involved. Many went on to do better and
worse, but this is one of those rare fulcrum moments in which everyone involved
gave their absolute best, and the result is a practically perfect movie in
every respect. These are exceedingly rare, but were unusually common (it seems)
in the eighties. Ghostbusters shared
its decade with the likes of Raiders of
the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Die Hard, E.T., The
Thing, Rain Man and Dead Poets
Society. For all the flack that the seemingly endless bout of eighties
nostalgia gets (and rightly deserves), the decade gave us a glut of truly
wonderful and timeless films. Perhaps it was because the decade was nestled
between the experimental seventies and the highly commercial nineties.

In many ways, Ghostbusters
was indicative of the time, when audiences were still expecting the originality
and complexity of the films of the seventies, while also looking for something
more… entertaining? I think that the reason so many movies from this time
period (and especially the mid decade) have such lasting influence is because
they are just so damned much fun. They found a way to have engaging characters,
involved in very detailed narratives, but never lose that sense of enjoyment.
Even in the likes of Sophie’s Choice
or Platoon, the decade lacked the
soul crushing nihilism of Apocalypse Now
and The Deer Hunter, or what would
eventually come from the independent movement with films like Donnie Darko or Requiem for a Dream. Vietnam
was over, greed was good, hair was big, and everyone just wanted to have fun.
And I think that reflects in the flood of comedies that came out in the
eighties. The wild, drug-fuelled chaos of SecondCity and SNL became the wild, drug-fuelled zeitgeist of the film industry, and
the likes of Eddie Murphy, Rick Moranis, Bill Murray, Frank Oz, and Steve
Martin were elevated to icons.

It all seemed to come together with Ghostbusters. I don’t think it hyperbolic to say that the original
film is a work of comedic geniuses, and that it could have (and rightfully
should have) fallen apart. And with something as subjective as comedy, which is
dependent entirely on taste, it is hard if not functionally impossible to say
that one is the best. Many would claim Blazing Saddles, while others would cite
Airplane or Office Space or A Shot In The Dark. But when taking in the complete
package, the balance of comedy to plot, focus on character and narrative
progression while remaining fulfilling and entertaining, without getting
distracted by the need to pull in easy laughs, Ghostbusters should be considered the most successfully comedic
film ever.

Many will blame the drugs, but the eighties saw a flux of
high concept films, the likes of which we still don’t get even today. All the
more amazing is that they managed to make them accessible to a general
audience, rather than get bogged down in detail, enjoyment reserved for the
privileged few that can discern what the hell is going on. Films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or Dragonslayer, or Dark Crystal, or Star Trek:
The Voyage Home (the one with the whales) all took familiar concepts and
pushed them up into a narrative level that audiences weren’t expecting. Then,
and this is the important part, expected the audience to follow them. They
didn’t dumb things down, they didn’t think the audience was stupid, and they
didn’t compromise in order to make things more accessible. Think of all the
time science fiction and fantasy movies wastes on exposition, and now think of
the films of the eighties. Most just threw the viewer into the deep end, and
expected them to pick things up as they went. And, shocker of shockers, they
did!

Ghostbusters, as a
comedy, is rivaled in the height of its concept by only one other work: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
This might not be a coincidence, as Ivan Reitman had spent years attempting to
bring Hitchhiker’s to the big screen, only to give up when Douglas Adams failed
to deliver or approve of new scripts. The project he immediately moved on to? Ghostbusters. Of course, Dan Aykroyd’s
original script was high concept enough. A team of time travelling, dimension
hopping ghost exterminators, acting almost like the Doctor Who of the dead. With Reitman onboard, a budget in place and
Harold Ramis keeping him grounded, the final product is no less conceptual, if
infinitely more filmable. Just think about the plot description, devoid of
anything else about the film: three university professors discover that life
after death exists, and start a business protecting the residents of New
York from the more malicious of the spirits that
remain. A concert cellist gets possessed by a hell hound, and an ancient god
unleashes a monstrous giant to destroy the city. Not a narrative that lends
itself to comedy, on the surface.

How they get around this is, at least in my analysis, they
don’t treat it as a comedy. This tends to be true of the best comedies (look at
the early filmography of Mel Brooks compared to his later stuff). They take the
story seriously; treating it with as much respect as one would a drama or a
historical epic. In part, this is by not thinking of the movie as a comedy.
Studios increasingly get bogged down in genre descriptions, thinking that
particular demographics will only see specific kinds of movies. The results
tend to be one dimensional and stretched to the limit. Movies that have
elements of several genres are more rounded, and more interesting. For a
comedy, or a movie with comedic aspirations, the trick is to infuse a narrative
that doesn’t lend itself to comedy with humour. In the case of Ghostbusters, they
don’t mug for the camera, wait for a laugh to land, or draw attention to the
jokes. A perfect example of this is the early exchange between Murray and
Ramis:

Peter: Egon, this reminds me of
the time you tried to drill a hole in your head, remember that?

Egon: That would have worked if
you didn’t stop me.

This exchange, apparently improvised by Ramis, is almost
said between breaths. They are walking towards the scene as it happens, and much
as you do in real life, they move on and focus on what they have to. They don’t
let the joke stop the narrative, they just keep moving. And it turns that joke
into a killer line. That’s a hard laugh line, and they risked burying it in the
exposition that follows. But, they knew that lingering on it, even for a
second, would ruin the timing, and in comedy, timing is everything. My biggest
issue with modern comedies is that rather than move on, they beat a joke into
the ground. The Judd Apatow-style string of rapid-fire improv one-liners is
tedious and brings the movie to a dead stop. These modern comedies can’t
maintain a pace when they have to hit the pause button every ten minutes so
they can be sure the audience gets the joke, or so they can congratulate
themselves for being so clever.

It also never lingers too much on the height of the concept.
They don’t get bogged down in the ghost phenomena. There are off hand comments
about the philosophical implications, or the skepticism of other characters,
but for the most part the film accepts that ghosts exist, and moves on with
that new reality. They don’t try to provide a pseudo-scientific explanation for
the existence of ghosts. They don’t provide any explanation at all. At no point
in the film does anyone die and rise again as an ectoplasmic personification of
their emotional being. There are ghosts, they leave goo everywhere, and they
are all an off-base colour. As Venkman says in the sequel, “…[S]ometimes shit
happens, someone has to deal with it, and who ya gonna call?” That is succinct
a description of the film as you can get.

The real success of the film comes from the talent involved.
This was a cream-of-the-crop eighties comedy cast. It might be the one moment
when Aykroyd was a bigger box office draw than Bill Murray. Murray and Ramis
were coming off Stripes, while Aykroyd
was coming off The Blues Brothers. Rick
Moranis was making his first real foray into film after incredible success
(with Ramis) at SCTV, and behind the
camera, Reitman had Animal House,
Meatballs and Stripes to his credit.
This wide range of styles and attitudes – scripted versus improvised, broad
versus dead pan – should have resulted in a mess. Instead it all works in
harmony. It helps that they had all worked together in one way or another
before, was familiar with each other’s foibles and styles. At any given moment
you have the deadpan deliveries of Ramis and Annie Potts, the straight
man/gleeful child performance of Aykroyd, the “let’s see where he’s going with
this” everyman antics of Murray, and the almost vaudevillian direction Moranis
goes in – none of which are strictly compatible – on screen at the same time,
and somehow functioning in harmony. The two outsiders – Sigourney Weaver and Ernie
Hudson – weren’t comedic actors, and yet afford themselves well (especially Weaver,
whose roll is basically to not react to Murray’s shenanigans) because everyone
is afforded the opportunity to do their own thing in their own way. It comes
off feeling like a real social group. Homogenized comedies tend to fill themselves
with identical characters of different severities and are filled with actors
who act in the same style. The result is a stale sameness. Ghostbusters has a palpable flavour.

Ghostbusters might
also be the prototype film for… pretty much every film of the modern era, in
that it is an origin story with increasingly high stakes and a large, special
effects driven set piece as a climax. This was still a decade before the birth
of the CG era, but before (and really, for the rest of the eighties), movies
maintained their personal level of involvement. Conflicts tended to be between
the hero and the villain. Shoot outs, fist fights, surf offs; movies ended with
a one-on-one confrontation. Even Back to
the Future ends with a race between a car and a lightning bolt. But the
dangers were always personal. Ghostbusters aimed higher, put the entire city in
jeopardy, and had the heroes fight against a seemingly insurmountable and much
more abstract threat. The Stay Puff Marshmallow Man is the progenitor of Sokovia
hanging in the sky, or Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith uploading a virus to the
mothership. The threat becomes abstract, and because it is abstract, it can be
as big and as menacing and as visually impressive as the film’s budget allows.
This has become the standard for all films in the modern age. In fact, the film
that feels the most like the direct child of Ghostbusters is Guardians of
the Galaxy, a spiritual successor in tone, scope and fun.

Ghostbusters is an
example of timeless quality. It is the elegant diamond necklace of film,
something that doesn’t clash, doesn’t age and looks as spectacular today as it
did back when it was made. This is because it at all times feels like an
earnest attempt to a genuinely interesting movie rather than a really funny
one. The latter is achieved because the former is succeeded at. It also avoids
the feel of just a bunch of friends making a movie together (something that,
with all due respect, makes Stripes a
subpar film), but rather a film that is improved by the fact that the cast is
aware enough of each other, to play off that and use it to enhance the
chemistry of the characters. The reward was immense popularity, becoming the
second most profitable film of 1984, and the most success film of the decade. A
film that has been a standard barer and insurmountable level of comedic
achievement since its release. How many times as the descriptor “like Ghostbusters, but with ____ instead of
ghosts,” been used to elevator-pitch a film? And how many have succeeded? Even
their own sequel failed to live up to those expectations, because the sequel
attempted to repeat every success of the original, but without the sincerity. Ghostbusters
was lightning in a bottle, a combination of so many rare elements all working
in unison to create, what for my money is, the most successfully comedic film
ever.

About
MR. Clark

Adopting the descriptor of "successfully unpublished author", MR. Clark began writing things on the internet in 2012, which he believed to be an entirely reputable and civilized place to find and deliver information. He regrets much.